​         Here’s something that nobody can deny at this point: gun violence is a huge problem in the United States. It seems that just about every week I hear about a new mass shooting that happened, and honestly, I am sick of it at this point. This is an issue that needs to be addressed. And it seems that people have known that it needs to be addressed for a very long time, judging by the fact that I just saw a documentary from 1995 about why we need better gun regulations.

         This is an HBO documentary that talks about the stories of five American children who ended up dead because of handguns that were just too easy for people to get their hands on. They interviewed the families of these kids, talking about what had happened the day that they died and how it could have been prevented. It was really sad watching them talk about these events, and they also showed statistics, like how in 1994, 3,600 children lost their lives to handguns.
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         According to my research, guns still kill 1,300 children each year, so even twenty-two years later, we still have a problem on our hands. I just hope that eventually we can get to a point where people dying from guns is not a very regular occurrence in this country. We need to do something about this.

Director: Ava DuVernay
Release Date: October 7, 2017
Rating: TV-MA
​Available on: Netflix

It’s time to talk about a topic that is much more serious than any other that I have covered so far: the mass incarceration of African-Americans. This documentary goes through all of American history since slavery was made illegal and details how the law has been abused as a way of keeping the African-American people oppressed.

The best way I could describe this film is… intense. It opened my eyes to a lot of things that I had never known about how the government and legal system are set up that were really shocking to me. The main point of the film was that the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, had a loophole that slavery can still be done as punishment for a crime. It also makes a point about how even though only five-percent of the world’s population lives in America, twenty-five-percent of the world’s prisoners are here, a statistic that is really just insane.

Watching how for years, American lawmakers have set things up in a way that specifically targets black people as the ones being punished the most was really horrifying. I mean I knew that these kind of things were happening, I just had not realized how deep it actually goes and how laws have been created specifically to keep black people in jail. For example, they showed that the War on Drugs made it so that possession of crack, which was cheaper and more prevalent in black communities than cocaine, was punished one-hundred times harsher than possession of cocaine, even though they were equally dangerous. Another important point was that if you went to prison, once you get out a lot of your freedoms still get taken away, regardless of what you were doing time for.
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These are things that you do not really think about much if they do not directly affect you, and I really hope that a lot of people see this movie so that they can better understand the hardships that black people face in this country. I remember that I used to think that oppression of black people basically ended with the Civil Rights Movement, but it is clear that we are not quite there yet. I hope that eventually we will get to a point in this world where we can all be treated as equals, regardless of skin color or ethnic background.

Gaming is a big part of my life. An even bigger part of my life is watching other people play games. Rise of the Super Gamer is a look into the lives of the people who compete in the world’s newest sport, e-sports, for a living.

Hosted by Daniel Howell, a YouTuber who among other things is one half of the gaming channel DanAndPhilGAMES, this film shows what it’s like for people who actually play video games, mostly League of Legends, at a professional level. Before I saw this film, I hadn’t realized how difficult being a pro-gamer actually was. They showed that some of the top level players basically have to do nothing but play if they want to keep up, which shows a ton of dedication. Some were playing for about seventeen hours a day, and doing anything for seventeen hours straight just seems crazy to me. It really does a great job of showing that, while playing video games all day might seem like an easy job, there is a lot of work that goes into it.
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Another part of the film went into a topic I never really considered before. It mentioned that most of the top pro-gamers are relatively young, in their twenties at the latest, and that reaction speed tends to go down when they hit twenty-two. And pro-gaming is a field that does not exactly give you most of the skills required for most jobs, so after their gaming career is over, it is hard to know what to do next.
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Overall this was a great documentary. It talked about a profession that a lot of people do not know a whole lot about in a way that was easy to understand, and even discussed some of the hardships of that career that I had honestly never thought of before.

Being Elmo is a film that takes you through the life of Kevin Clash, a man who started out as a fan of Jim Henson and eventually ended up becoming the main puppeteer of Elmo.

If there is one thing that can be said about this film, it's that I could not stop smiling throughout almost the entire thing. It is definitely very difficult to not smile when the subject is Elmo, the very personification of love and happiness itself.

This film takes you through Kevin Clash's entire life up to 2011, which seemed to always involve some sort of Jim Henson production, interestingly enough. It was really cool to see Kevin getting inspired by the early days of Sesame Street to create his own puppets and become an amazing puppeteer. I am amazed at how he was able to create his own puppets just from what he learned watching Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, I cannot imagine that that is an easy thing to do. I mean I have watched a lot of things with the Muppets, but there is a difference between watching the Muppets and building your own Muppet, that seems like a step beyond what most people do.

It was interesting to see the early days of Muppet productions from the first Sesame Street, and seeing what it was like working with Jim Henson. Kevin Clash pretty much lived out his childhood dream of not only working with Jim Henson and the Muppets, but also basically creating one of, if not the most popular Muppet characters of all time. If there was one thing I got out of this film, it's that you should follow your dreams and do what makes you happy. People along the way will tell you that you can never succeed, but if you keep on trying, even what might seem impossible at the time can be accomplished.

Bitcoin always seemed very interesting to me. The idea of a currency that is run almost entirely outside the regulation of the government seems fascinating. One thing I learned from this film that I hadn’t realized before was that Bitcoin was not actually the first digital currency that people tried to do, it was only the one that grew the most. It was especially interesting to me the part where they talk about how a man who was selling Bitcoins to drug users was sent to prison, while no bankers responsible for the financial crisis were punished at all for that, I just found that really unfair.
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I found the idea of the Bitcoin Center in New York City to be really cool, since it seemed like a step in the direction of making Bitcoin more mainstream. It’s a shame that they had to shut down, though. They mentioned in this film that most of the biggest organizations in Bitcoin had already been shut down by the time this movie was made, even with the relatively short lifespan of the bitcoin industry.

​A big part of this film was talking about the mystery identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin who had been really big in the Bitcoin community for a while before just disappearing one day, and nobody knows for sure who he really was. Unsolved mysteries like that are always really fascinating, and while there are many theories as to who this person could be (assuming it is just a single person), nobody knows for sure what the truth is.

The concept of blockchain that Bitcoin is built on is very interesting. The fact that every payment done through bitcoin is not monitored by some third-party but by the computers that send and receive bitcoin payments is very cool for those that want more privacy with what they are buying, especially since bitcoin is entirely anonymous. But if there is one thing that this film shows, it's that we still have a long way to go until bitcoin is completely accepted in the mainstream as an actual currency. If you want to learn more about the history of Bitcoin, I definitely recommend this film.

Hey, everyone, happy Halloween! I haven't uploaded anything in this part of the website for a while, but I've decided to start doing this thing where I start reviewing documentaries! So this is the first thing of that!

I don’t know about you, but I for one love video games. I love all kinds of games, but I am especially fascinated by games from the earliest days of gaming. Back when video games were a much newer industry, and while the technology at the time was nowhere near what it is now, they still managed to create fun and iconic games that people could play for hours. When concepts like extra lives that seem extremely basic and obvious to modern audiences were just beginning to be put into games.

Another thing I’m fascinated by is urban legends, especially ones that happen to be about old video games. Of course, one of gaming’s greatest urban legends is the one about how Atari was so embarrassed by the failure of their game adaptation of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, which was supposedly the tipping point that single-handedly crashed the video game industry until the NES, that they buried all their unsold cartridges in the New Mexico desert. Atari: Game Over is a documentary that gives us a look into the rise and fall of the great Atari, while also finally settling the debate of if there is actually anything buried there.

I really liked this film. It has two main storylines that it follows: the story of Howard Scott Warshaw (also known as HSW) and his time as a game designer for Atari that would eventually lead him to creating E.T., and the story of the team of people looking to dig up the infamous Atari landfill. Both stories eventually come together when HSW made a trip to the landfill, which was a perfect conclusion to wrap up the whole thing.

I learned a lot from this film. I had no idea how crazy working at Atari actually was at the time, it seems like a really fun place to be. But what really surprised me was that the guy most well known for creating what was supposedly the worst game of all time actually also created some of the greatest Atari games ever. Yars’ Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark were both his creations, and I have found those in list of the best Atari games of all time. It really is a shame that someone who has also made such great games is most well known nowadays as the guy who ruined video games for everyone, it just seems unfair. The film also goes into detail about the game’s development, and how HSW was trying to do things that had never been done before in games, like a 3D world, and he wanted people to build emotional connections with the game’s characters. He wanted to make something that was worthy of being attached to such a masterpiece of a movie that E.T. was. It seems like it had potential to be a really amazing game, but the ludicrous time constraint of five weeks to make a whole game just was not enough. It just goes to show you that you shouldn’t rush out a product that isn’t finished.
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Overall, I loved this movie. It gave a great insight into what working at Atari was like, and it was really cool to watch what happened on the day that the Atari burial was finally unearthed. I hope that this film will eventually give Howard Scott Warshaw the place in gaming history that he deserves, not as the destroyer of the gaming industry, but as a programmer who tried his best with what little he was given. If you, like me, are a fan of old video games and might want to learn more about this important part of gaming history, I highly recommend this film. You can find the movie on Netflix and the Xbox Video store.

​This game as multiple modes. In Smash mode, up to eight players (twice as many as in previous installments) fight to knock each other off the stage. Special Smash is similar to Smash, except you can add special modifiers to make things more interesting, like making everybody invisible or add 1% of damage per second. This can be fun, though it also has the potential to be… let’s just say rather chaotic. Classic mode has you fight the characters in a certain order and fight a boss at the end that is more difficult based on how many coins you spent to access it.All-Star mode has you fighting every character in the game in reverse chronological order based on when their game was released. The trophy gallery lets you view trophies of different characters and objects from various franchises represented in the game, making this feel even more like a video game museum. Yes, there is a Pong trophy.

​Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is a fun fighting game with some great choices for characters and a lot of great customization options and different modes that keep things fresh. All in all I give this game a 9 out of 10.

During unity week here at RCHS, The Catamount has decided to write about things that involve unifying different cultures. For my article I’ve chosen to write about a rather interesting project called the School in the Cloud. The School in the Cloud is a project that is attempting to revolutionize how people learn information by using the technology we currently have today. The main idea behind this is that research has shown that when groups on children are given internet access and a question they want answered, they can really learn just about anything. Knowing this, the School in the Cloud has created Self-Organized Learning Enviroments (or SOLEs, because why say ten syllables when you could just say one), which is not specifically one place in the world. It’s actually more ANYWHERE THAT YOU HAVE INTERNET ACCESS. So roughly 40% of the planet.

Not only is this way of learning more in line with what technology allows us to do now, it also lets people from completely opposite sides of the world to be able to learn with each other (well, technically the exact opposite side of the world from the United States is the Indian Ocean, but you get the point.) A person in the USA can be in the same class learning just about the same thing as someone from India. This is really a great idea in my opinion.

The way that this works as much as I understand it is students will connect together with these SOLEs and “grannies” (basically adults who supervise the learning sessions over Skype) and work together trying to figure out the answer to a big question they were asked. I feel like this way of learning is a great idea. If there’s one thing the internet is good for (besides cat videos, funny videos, disturbing videos, and disturbingly funny cat videos) it’s finding information. There are several things that I’ve learned not from school or asking somebody who already knew, but from typing something in onGoogle. In fact, there’s even a website dedicated to telling people to look something up on Google when they need an answer. (Another thing the internet is good for is sarcasm.) This is just a way to use this as an actual form of learning. I really think this idea can work, and I wish this organization luck for the future.
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I mentioned that any place in the world with internet connection can be a part of this. That’s about 40% of our planet. Maybe in the future we can expand that so that everybody can be connected. That would make us one step closer to cultural unity.

Developed by: Scott Cawthon
Genre: Role-playing game
Game System: Microsoft Windows
Price: Free
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If you’ve been on the internet in the past eighteen months you’ve probably heard of Five Nights at Freddy’s. The indie horror game franchise created by Scott Cawthon, revolving around the story of a pizzeria that’s fun for families but absolutely terrifying for the night staff due to the animatronic characters trying their best to end your life by the end of the week, has gained a large fanbase that has spent lots of time and energy to uncover every secret in an effort to discover the secrets behind its hidden lore. And once everybody figured it out the fandom basically said “Whelp, our work here is done, but after the movie comes out I’ll probably forget this ever happened OOH, WHAT’S UNDERTALE?” But the games really were very fun and frightening (at least they were scary the first seven times you played them, then they get much less.)

Of course when Scott finally finished the main quartet of games, he decided that his franchise about a family pizzeria that houses robotic cartoon animals that try to kill the night guard due to being possessed by the vengeful spirits of children that were murdered by a serial killer disguised as one of the characters originally designed for the sole purpose of bringing joy to children but have now can only be remembered as the murderous nightmare creatures he has forced them to become would be a great subject for a colorful child-friendly spin-off! I can think of several problems with this brilliant plan.

Mommy! Mommy! There’s a FNaF movie! Can we go see it, Mommy?
Well, Billy, you love the completely family-friendly game so much, I don’t see why not!
3 weeks later…
Why is our son running around the house and shining a flashlight down the hallway every night until 6AM?
CHUCK E. CHEESE IS GONNA EAT ME!

And that’s why you don’t take children to horror movies. But hey, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, let’s see if this game is good on its own!

​The story of this game goes that--

An interesting part of this game is the fact that there are multiple endings. Some of these endings are hidden and others are easier to find than others, but they are all mostly worth getting. Two of them are actually really funny, as long as you’re okay with accidentally having to restart the entire game again (protip for avoiding this: don’t put Fredbear in front of your party and don’t go too deep into the code.) Also most of these endings will prove that this game really has no fourth wall (well, it does have one fourth wall, and the final boss throws it at you), and if you look hard enough you might just find an old friend from one of Scott’s lesser known games.
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This game can be rather slow starting out, but once you get a good party of characters it can be very fun and it’s a nice tribute to the franchise that took the internet by storm for most of 2015. I give this game 7 surprisingly creepy introduction screens out of 10.

Angry Birds is a very popular game, and one of the most famous smartphone games ever. It has a very simple plot and gameplay mechanic, where you launch birds with different special abilities at pigs to destroy them and get back the eggs they stole. So at some point, they decided to make a movie based on the game, because reasons. Probably mostly money-related reasons. As much as I believe the main reason the film was made was because money is a thing, I am very excited for the film. Of course every popular (or just money-making) movie will need its own video game, right? Now that Angry Birds Action exists we have a video game based on a movie based on a video game! Just like when they made a video game based on the Pokémon Trading Card Game that was based off a video game, or Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game(yes, that was an actual thing that happened.) Hmm, I wonder what it would be like if there was a video game based on the Super Mario Bros. movie… I’m getting off topic, aren’t I?

When you first start up the game you’ll you’ll realize that this game deviates greatly from the classic gameplay of Angry Birds. Like normal Angry Birds, you launch birds with different abilities in an effort to get back your eggs. This time however, they went in less of a ‘slingshot launching’ direction and more of a… ‘pinball-ish’ direction.  In this game instead of destroying all the pigs in a stage, you need to break obstacles to rescue the eggs that the pigs stole… including the pedestals the eggs stand on. If this were in reality-land, those eggs would be scrambled by the time you launch head first into them at full force, but I really shouldn’t try to put logic into a series where the main plot is that a bunch of pigs stole some birds’ eggs, who are fighting back by launching themselves out of a slingshot hard enough to break through stone and explode said pigs. Also the pigs are green, because why wouldn’t they be? Also when you collect the eggs on your last life you get a really cool slow-motion closeup that really makes the game a bit more exciting!

There are a few things in this game that set it apart from other Angry Birdsgames. One thing is when you launch the birds they bounce off the wall into every direction for a few seconds, breaking just about everything in its path and collecting eggs, coins, and other stuff along the way. This is actually really fun, even though it can be hard to tell where the bird is going to go. Also, if you launch the bird and then sneeze you may find that half the map has already been blown up. Speaking of blowing up, there are different birds in this game that all have special abilities, which are basically what you would expect if you’ve played any other Angry Birds games (including the one that explodes everything around him.) In each level you collect coins along the way which will get you a mystery gift if you collect enough, which is usually a power-up that will do something like have the bird speed up every time it bounces off the wall. You can also get coins and power-ups with the Wheel of Fortune after some of the levels (Pssst! Rovio! Merv Griffin will be seeing you in court!) or the thing where you pick three mystery items after a level.

My only major complaint is really that when the birds lose all their lives, you need to use an in-game currency called gems to get more. You can win these in the Wheel of Copyright Infringement or the ‘pick-three’ lottery, but if you don’t have any, then you’re stuck using real money. You also have to use real money if you want extra turns after you’ve played as many levels as you’re allowed to play in one turn. They do give out new turns regularly though, so it’s not too bad, but still I don’t really like it when games try to limit how much you can play them.
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I gotta say, I was not expecting this game to be so fun. It really is fun and exciting to launch the birds and see them bouncing off the walls to get the eggs and explode just about everything, and also that slow-motion closeup when you get the eggs on your last life. However, the game still falls into the same traps that most mobile games nowadays do, with the paying of extra money for playing longer sessions, which prevents it from being perfect. I give this game a 7 out of 10.